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THE VIEW FROM OVER THE WATERSHED “I’ll be merciful—as soon as I get even.” by Jay C. Smith I hope this finds you refreshed by your summertime experiences, whether you had a vacation or not. Admittedly, I know full well that some vacations are more exhausting than work is. I’ve had a few. In the law business, as in most parts of the service sector, the work isn’t usually the real difficulty, the customers (or as we call them, clients) are. Some lawyers get cynical enough about their clients to distrust them all and say things like “Don’t expect to meet nice people in your practice. Nice people don’t get sued—and they don’t sue anyone, either.” Like most hostile generalizations, there is a grain of truth in it. Probably more than a grain; but I have had clients who were nice people and I hope you have too. It’s so much easier to be nice to nice people than the non-nice ones, but the un-nice people seem to demand it more. Certainly, more than they’ve earned. It’s a relief when the not-nice ones are the other side’s clients, so that you can get fully into the “comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable” mode against folks who seem to deserve it. Family law lets you be angry with both your opposing counsel and your client’s ex or soon to be spouse or significant other. In criminal law defense your anger will usually be against the self-righteous, sneaky prosecutor or the lying cops. Criminal defendants may be bad people, but they are usually nice to their counsel. (Not always; Mike Dellostritto got stabbed by one of his clients, I recall. I’m sure it was nothing personal, though.) It’s more of a problem if the not-nice person is your client. Fi you’ve agreed to take the case you have an obligation to do the best you can for the client, even if you begin to dislike them. Sometimes it becomes a sticky bit of pride to do a good job in spite of your dislike of your client. When you have nice people for clients it heightens the hurt if you lose. (Worse yet, several times I’ve had nice clients who tried to comfort me when we lost. “It’ll be okay,” they told me. Made me feel better and worse at the same time.)
I had one client who flat-out surprised me. It was a relatively small dispute over some sort of business or sales transaction—I don’t recall exactly. My client was the plaintiff, and the defendant was someone who had once gone to the same church as my client. My client was a regular church goer who identified himself as a Christian. Shortly after the lawsuit had begun he attended a sermon covering I Corinthians 6, which condemns the practice of Christians taking other Christians to courts to settle disputes. There are many easy ways to evade the burden of the teaching and proceed with the lawsuit. Times have changed—the judges in New Testament times would have been heathens, whereas there is a reasonable chance a judge here and now would be a Christian, or at least a churchgoer. Going to court back then implied support for the blasphemous Roman emperor. Totally different now. If the defendant gets away he may cheat others. Nonetheless, my client instructed me to dismiss the action and I did. He said he was ah happy to have the matter over, even if he was out a sum of money. He seemed happy and may well have made the better choice. To quote Voltaire: “I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.” Jay C. Smith is a Bakersfield attorney who retired from the Department of Child Support Services after working there for 15 years. He was in private practice for 25 years before joining DCSS. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019